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Admin vs. Non-Admin and impact

We are a company of 1500 employees with approx 10 office locations and one Service Desk located at our headquarters. We are moving from XP to Windows 7 on our client machines. At present, our employees have admin rights on their machines...not a great scenario. With the transfer to Windows 7 we would like to begin employing non-admin rights. We are concerned, however, how this change will impact our Service Desk. Upper management would like stats on how other companies "run". How many employees are there? What is the Service Desk technician per employee ratio? What are the responsibilities of the Service Desk...do they build and decommission computers as well? What OS is being used? Do users have admin rights? Etc. If you would take 10 mins to tell me a bit about the environment you work in it would be much appreciated!

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You're asking about a lot more than just Admin rights.

I'm at a site with appx. 350 employees and 225 computers. I'm the only tech here; the rest are at company HQ several hundred miles away, so there's your tech-to-employee ratio. We build and decommission systems here and at the other location.

The only employees I allow Admin rights are our field techs who spend most of their time repairing our products. They must constantly download new versions of our test programs. Everyone else gets Power User. Experience has shown that while I have to take time to install an app for a user, that's less time than I would spend removing malware. I took this position when we rolled out Windows 2000, and I haven't changed it for XP or W7.

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